riceissa

Is there a full list of grantees and re­spec­tive grant amounts for the refer­ral-based round?

Is there some sort of eval­u­a­tion pro­cess for funded pro­jects that have con­cluded? I am cu­ri­ous es­pe­cially about the out­comes of the pro­jects that were funded in the 2017 round (that have now had the money for about a year). This ques­tion was asked about a year ago, but the de­tails seemed un­cer­tain at the time so I am re-ask­ing the ques­tion.

I think there might be a mi­s­un­der­stand­ing here, so I would like to clar­ify a cou­ple of things.

I also don’t want the fact that one per­son has done the pro­ject at one point to mean that no one can ever do the pro­ject again.

I as­sume this is refer­ring to me, and that Peter is say­ing the Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Wiki is dead. It’s true that the wiki was in­ac­tive for about two years, but more re­cently I’ve been adding more con­tent to it; there is an edit his­tory graph show­ing ac­tivity for the past year.

But even as­sum­ing the wiki is dead, I’m not sure start­ing es­sen­tially from scratch is bet­ter than re­viv­ing the ex­ist­ing pro­ject.

We mainly chose to go with a differ­ent wiki soft­ware to im­prove the edit­ing ex­pe­rience (es­pe­cially edit­ing with­out cre­at­ing an ac­count) to re­move bar­ri­ers to con­tri­bu­tion.

The choices of wiki soft­ware and of al­low­ing anony­mous ed­its are not un­change­able. For the former, I’ve ac­tu­ally been pon­der­ing for a while whether switch­ing to Me­di­aWiki would be a good idea (I haven’t looked into Wiki.js, which is what Pri­or­i­tyWiki uses), as I’ve got­ten more ex­pe­rience with edit­ing on Me­di­aWiki wikis since the time when I started the Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Wiki. For the lat­ter, my think­ing has been that I don’t want to spend a lot of time mod­er­at­ing the wiki, which is why I chose to re­strict ac­count cre­ation and dis­able anony­mous ed­its. But if there is enough en­ergy to mod­er­ate the wiki, I would be fine with al­low­ing more open edit­ing.

Some thoughts I had about com­pe­ti­tion while think­ing about this situ­a­tion (I haven’t spent a lot of time think­ing about this topic):

In gen­eral I think com­pe­ti­tion benefits end users.

There are four ex­ist­ing wikis about bit­coin that I know of, which might be an in­ter­est­ing case study:

With free soft­ware, fork­ing is of­ten difficult (ex­ist­ing code­base too com­pli­cated to un­der­stand, writ­ten for a differ­ent OS, writ­ten in a lan­guage that one is un­fa­mil­iar with) so there’s a pro­lifer­a­tion of similar ap­pli­ca­tions. This seems to be less of a prob­lem for prose.

Again with free soft­ware, differ­ent soft­ware pro­jects fo­cus on differ­ent (some­times in­com­pat­i­ble) things, like speed, fea­ture-rich­ness, mem­ory use, porta­bil­ity. With a wiki, there is still some of that (one can trade off along for­mal vs in­for­mal lan­guage, back­ground knowl­edge as­sumed, au­di­ence’s goals) but I think it’s less strong.

Again for soft­ware, there is also the is­sue of get­ting stuck in lo­cal op­tima (think how hor­rible LaTeX is but peo­ple are forced to use it). I think Wikipe­dia is similarly a lo­cal op­ti­mum for a generic en­cy­clo­pe­dia, but this seems mostly prob­le­matic be­cause of its dele­tion­ism.

For prod­ucts that are sold there is also com­pe­ti­tion along price.

For text­books, I think it’s good that there are a bunch of them for each (topic, level) com­bi­na­tion, be­cause ex­po­si­tion style/​difficulty can vary sig­nifi­cantly. I think for gen­eral refer­ence works there is a lot less of that, and even less for in­clu­sion­ist elec­tronic wikis.

An­ders Sand­berg’s Flickr ac­count has a 2014 photo of a white­board from FHI con­tain­ing es­ti­mates for the fol­low­ing state­ments/​ques­tions:

Prob­a­bil­ity that >50% of hu­mans will die in a dis­aster in next 100 years

Are we liv­ing in a com­puter simu­la­tion cre­ated by some ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tion?

Your cre­dence that hu­man­ity goes ex­tinct in the next 100 years – re­plac­ing us with some­thing bet­ter (e.g. WBE) doesn’t count

Your cre­dence that AGI is de­vel­oped by 2050 (on Earth)

The photo cap­tion is:

Office guesses at (A) a dis­aster kil­ling 50%+ of hu­man­ity in the next cen­tury, (B) our re­al­ity turn­ing out to be a simu­la­tion, (C) ex­tinc­tion within a cen­tury, and (D) ar­tifi­cial gen­eral in­tel­li­gence be­fore 2050.

This is based on ear­lier Au­mann agree­ment ex­per­i­ments we did. Cre­dences are free to up­date as we see each other’s views, as well as get new ev­i­dence.

There are twoother pho­tos show­ing parts of the same (or similar) white­board.

This is Issa Rice, one of the paid writ­ers men­tioned in this post. In ad­di­tion to writ­ing pages, I also provide feed­back to some of the other paid writ­ers on pages they are cre­at­ing.

Work­ing with Vipul has been a gen­er­ally pos­i­tive and en­joy­able ex­pe­rience. He has deep knowl­edge of both the work­ings of Wikipe­dia as well as the top­ics on which he wants pages cre­ated (al­though this might be less true for some of the newer top­ics in this post). Prior to work­ing for Vipul, I had vir­tu­ally no ex­pe­rience edit­ing Wikipe­dia pages. Vipul walked me through the ba­sics (like mak­ing sure to cre­ate pages un­der one’s user space, hav­ing enough cita­tions, cer­tain other rules for Wikipe­dia edit­ing, and so forth—things that are not ob­vi­ous for a new Wikipe­dia ed­i­tor) so that I was soon able to be­gin cre­at­ing pages. For each new topic I worked on (tax­a­tion, im­mi­gra­tion, global health), Vipul has been will­ing to guide me through the ba­sics, help find use­ful sources, and re­view the page be­fore pub­li­ca­tion.

As some­one who cares about his al­tru­is­tic out­put and im­pact on the world, I’m still un­cer­tain about the over­all im­pact of writ­ing for Wikipe­dia rel­a­tive to other things I could be work­ing on, but I think of work­ing for Vipul as a fairly unique op­por­tu­nity to gain ex­pe­rience and ex­per­tise on top­ics while get­ting paid.

As men­tioned in the post, the in­tended au­di­ence is some­thing like “peo­ple who think about effec­tive giv­ing, flow of money in the non-profit world, real-world de­ci­sion mak­ing, and similar top­ics”. To give some ex­am­ples:

In June 2017, there was a Face­book event called “What’s Up With the Open Philan­thropy Pro­ject?” The event looked at some of Open Phil’s work, com­piling some doc­u­ments about some of Open Phil’s grants in the pro­cess. Look­ing at the times­tamps, I think the Google Docs were cre­ated when the meetup be­gan, and were filled in dur­ing the course of the meetup. (Last up­dated 2017-06-09.)

I think in all the above cases, ei­ther the cur­rent ver­sion of DLW or an im­proved ver­sion in the fu­ture performs a su­per­set of the data col­lec­tion/​anal­y­sis, is con­tinu­ally up­dated, and pro­vides a sin­gle lo­ca­tion for all the data and anal­y­sis.

Vipul has also made com­ments (1, 2) and at least one post us­ing in part data col­lected by DLW, to make ob­ser­va­tions or an­swer peo­ple’s ques­tions.

Even if you’re not in­ter­ested in ori­ent­ing your life around helping with x-risk – if you just want to not be blind­sided by rad­i­cal changes that may be coming

[...]

We don’t know ex­actly what will hap­pen, but I ex­pect se­ri­ous changes of some sort over the next 10 years. Even if you aren’t com­mit­ting to sav­ing the world, I think it’s in your in­ter­est just to un­der­stand what is hap­pen­ing, so in a decade or two you aren’t com­pletely lost.

And even ‘un­der­stand­ing the situ­a­tion’ is com­pli­cated enough that I think you need to be able to quit your day-job and fo­cus full-time, in or­der to get ori­ented.

Ray­mond, do you or An­drew Critch have any con­crete pos­si­bil­ities in mind for what “ori­ent­ing one’s life”/​“un­der­stand­ing the situ­a­tion” might look like from a non-al­tru­is­tic per­spec­tive? I’m in­ter­ested in hear­ing con­crete ideas for what one might do; the only sug­ges­tions I can re­call see­ing so far were men­tioned in the 80,000 Hours pod­cast epi­sode with Paul Chris­ti­ano, to save money and in­vest in cer­tain com­pa­nies. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?

The way I am imag­in­ing it, a per­son think­ing about this from a non-al­tru­is­tic per­spec­tive would then think about the prob­lem for sev­eral years and would nar­row this list down (or add new things to it) and act on some sub­set of them (e.g. maybe they would think about which com­pa­nies to in­vest in and de­cide how much money to save, but to not im­ple­ment some other idea). Is this an ac­cu­rate un­der­stand­ing of your view?

Re top MIRI donors, there is a 2013 in re­view post that talks about a sur­vey of “(nearly) ev­ery donor who gave more than $3,000 in 2013” with four out of ap­prox­i­mately 35 com­ing into con­tact via HPMoR. (Not to im­ply that this is the sur­vey men­tioned above, as sev­eral de­tails differ.)

Hi Ben, thanks for the sug­ges­tion. I would be fine with mov­ing the ac­tive work to the EA Wiki, but I see two challenges: (1) the EA Wiki uses Me­di­aWiki markup in­stead of Mark­down; (2) the EA Wiki tends to use CC BY-SA in­stead of CC BY-NC-SA as its li­cense, so GiveWell’s origi­nal li­cense would need to ex­plic­itly be main­tained.

I worked on this post un­der a fairly tight time con­straint, so I was not able to clean it up in all the ways I would have liked to (in­clud­ing us­ing full sen­tences, as you men­tion). There was also the con­cern that the post would be mostly ig­nored, caus­ing my ex­tra efforts to be wasted. Since this type of post seems to have gen­er­ated a fair amount of in­ter­est, I would be will­ing to push for do­ing a cleaner job in the fu­ture.

Also, the source Mark­down file for this post is available on GitHub, and, with the fairly per­mis­sive li­cense, it would be pos­si­ble for some­one else to come along and fix things (or fund some­one to do so); I would be happy to up­date this post to in­cor­po­rate any sig­nifi­cant im­prove­ments.

I am hav­ing trou­ble in­ter­pret­ing state­ments like “it does not seem to be on any­one’s agenda” and “not some­thing that any­one has looked at sys­tem­at­i­cally”. Can you say more about where you have looked and what you have re­jected? (From the ti­tle of the post I ex­pected to see men­tions of Ar­bital, Distill, re­search debt, the many ex­plana­tory pieces pub­lished on LessWrong and the EA Fo­rum, work by Michael Niel­sen, and Me­ta­cademy, to name some pro­jects that I have seen men­tioned and dis­cussed by effec­tive al­tru­ists.)